Gaetano Zumbo

Il Morbo Gallico

Gaetano Zumbo (* 1656 in Syracuse ; † 1701 ) was an Italian wax artist who specialized primarily in depicting the decay of the human body.

Life

Gaetano Zumbo was a monk from Syracuse who, as an autodidact, created anatomical representations from wax and arranged them artistically. Among other things, he created a birth of the Savior and a Descent from the Cross. Louis XIV bought a very faithfully reproduced human head of Zumbo , who in 1701 granted him his own privilege for such works. Gaetano Zumbo created several representations of decaying human bodies for Grand Duke Cosimo III. Medici . He was one of the earliest medically interested wax makers. Zumbo's life was portrayed in the 2010 novel La splendeur de soleil by Christine Brusson .

A collection of wax works of art by Zumbo is in the zoological and natural history museum La Specola in Florence .

Works and reactions

La Peste , detail

The Imperiale Reale Museo di Fisica e Storia Naturale , now known as La Specola , opened in Florence in 1775. The visitors and admirers of the wax bodies exhibited there included Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Joseph II. The latter created an anatomical teaching collection based on the Florentine model in Vienna , whereas Goethe did not succeed in establishing a similar institution in Berlin .

On display in Florence are, among others, Zumbo's works La Peste and Il Trionfo del Tempo , created in Naples , both between 1687 and 1691, as well as the tableaus La Vanità della Gloria Umana and Il Morbo Gallico ( Syphilis ) made in Florence between 1691 and 1694 . These half-reliefs are all about 85 by 90 centimeters and 46 centimeters deep; Il Morbo Gallico is not completely preserved. Lost is La Corruzione , a work that depicted the stages of decomposition of dead bodies.

La Vanità , detail

But the tableau La Vanità della Gloria Umana, which is almost overloaded with allegories of transience, shows the decay of corpses very vividly. In a ruinous grave vault, on the far left, a putrid male corpse spilling out of a sarcophagus can be seen, at whose feet lie skulls, a dog carcass and other decaying human bodies on which rats are feasting. The final stage of decomposition is documented by a skeleton that can be seen in a grave sculpture that has been broken open. An urn stands on a pedestal. A female personification of melancholy made of marble sits above this scene. Illuminated by daylight, this statue looks almost full of life. References to belief in the resurrection or Christian symbols are not to be found in this memento mori , but "almost all borderline phenomena [...] that are excluded from the field of the beautiful by the Enlightenment and classicism " - which, for example, met with strong rejection from Herder .

Other viewers of the macabre scenes, on the other hand, expressed themselves positively: Even before the opening of the museum in Florence, Georg Keyßler visited Zumbo's works and stated in 1740: “As unpleasant as human self-love such a setting is, the work, which everything in [ sic!] expresses little ones, and you can hardly see yourself tired. "

Tradition of wax-making

Wax as a modeling and casting material was already known in ancient Egypt and was used, among other things, to embalm mummies ; In ancient Greece and Italy, images of gods, masks and other objects were made from wax, including wax votive offerings for temples and healing places. During Hellenism , wax was first used as a material for sculpted portraits, which were usually still associated with the cult of the dead. It was not until the Renaissance that wax was used for scientific purposes. Leonardo da Vinci used it to pour out the heart and brain ventricles; Frederik Ruysch injected it into the bloodstream of his preparations to reveal filled blood vessels. Ruysch lived from 1638 to 1731, making him a contemporary of Zumbo.

The Flame Andreas Vesalius founded modern anatomy in the University of Padua in the 16th century . Findings that had been gained through sections and other scientific observations were captured and made clear through wax works of art such as the Zumbos. In the 18th century, wax sculptors such as Ercole Lelli , Giovanni Manzolini and Anna Morandi followed this tradition in Bologna . Around 200 corpses are said to have been needed to create a single anatomical wax model. In addition to Zumbo, Ludovico Cigoli , a very early representative of wax sculptures, and Clemente Susini in the 18th century were active in this field in Florence .

Moulage

At the beginning of the 19th century, the first moulages were made to show pathologically altered body regions. This happened independently of one another in different places, for example in Jena by Franz Heinrich Martens , in London by Joseph Towne and in Vienna by Anton Elfinger . In 1889, more than 2000 pieces from Jules Pierre Francois Baretta's moulage collection were shown at the first international “Congress for Dermatology and Sypholography” in Paris. In the period that followed, similar collections were created at numerous medical centers, often with a subject-specific focus. For this purpose, mouleurs were employed at larger clinics. Moulages were used as teaching aids until the 1940s. In addition to losses caused by the Second World War , the collections were also decimated by the advent of color slide photography, which soon replaced the expensive moulages in the post-war period. Moulages experienced a renaissance as documents and museum pieces of cultural and medical historical interest from the 1990s onwards. In the meantime, they are being used increasingly in teaching and sometimes even made from scratch.

literature

• Anja Wolkenhauer, "This waxy story is terribly true". The wax figures of Don Gaetano Zumbo between art and medical anatomy , in: Gabriele Dürbeck et al. (Ed.), Perception of nature, nature of perception. Studies on the history of visual culture around 1800 , Amsterdam / Dresden 2001, pp. 71–85
• Walther Fuchs, projections in wax. On the beginnings of a new imaging method in medicine in the 18th century , 2012 dissertation, University of Zurich

Web links

Commons : Gaetano Zumbo  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ^ General German real encyclopedia for the educated classes. (Conversations-Lexikon) , first volume. A to p. Seventh original edition, Leipzig 1830, p. 894
2. ↑ Julius von Schlosser (ed.), Dead Views. History of portrait painting in wax , Oldenbourg Akademieverlag 1995, ISBN 978-3-05-002408-0 , p. 101
3. ↑ ^{a b} La Specola
4. ↑ Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff, The injured body. Revisions of the classical ideal of beauty , Wallstein Verlag 2001, ISBN 978-3-89244-487-9 , p. 80
5. ↑ quoted from: Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff, The injured body. Revisions of the classical ideal of beauty , Wallstein Verlag 2001, ISBN 978-3-89244-487-9 , p. 78
6. ↑ ^{a b} Archive for medical wax images ( Memento of the original from January 29, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
7. ^ Review of anatomy as art